http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i45/45a03301.htm
From the issue dated July 14, 2006
More Than Words
The U. of Southern California trains students how to read — and communicate in — new media
By PETER MONAGHAN
Los Angeles
Once, literacy meant knowing how to read and understand text. But these days, advocates of a broader definition of literacy say students must be able to interpret not only words, but also still and moving images, understanding how those images are constructed, how they create meaning, and how they can deceive.
Thanks to personal computing, this generation of undergraduates has mastered the grammars of visual and other media with ease. But more and more careers require graduates to parse and produce varied media materials, say staff members at the University of Southern California's Institute for Multimedia Literacy here. The Institute's mission is to instill those skills in students, as well as to train faculty members to understand the vernacular of the screen and to use it — in research, publication, and pedagogy — as an equal of text.
"We're not attacking the text," says Elizabeth M. Daley, dean of the university's School of Cinema-Television and executive director of the Annenberg Center for Communication, which runs the multimedia institute. "We really like texts. It's just that with multimedia, you're penetrating things at so many layers and levels that you can't with just text."
Since 1997, the institute has trained more than 50 professors, in varied disciplines, to create multimedia instructional packages that combine text, sound, video, computer graphics, and Web content. In turn, those faculty members have taught thousands of students the basics of multimedia literacy.
The most unusual aspect of the university's approach is an honors program for students from a variety of disciplines who show particular aptitude for working with the new media, with the hope of expanding the approach throughout the campus.
The institute has put USC on the cutting edge of undergraduate pedagogy, says Gail E. Hawisher, a professor of English and founding director of the Center for Writing Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While creating a new course called "Writing With Video," Ms. Hawisher has been scouring the country for programs comparable to that of USC. She could not find a single one.
Ms. Hawisher says many universities have courses that encourage multimedia literacy, but only a few, including Ball State, Purdue at its main campus, and Stanford, offer courses that incorporate multimedia content.
For at least 15 years, some colleges have promoted multimedia course work, but most efforts have foundered for lack of institutional commitment, or have remained confined to a particular program. Ms. Hawisher finds that odd, because educational theorists increasingly recognize that any single mode of communication, she says, "can represent only a portion of the meaning that writers, and most especially our students, want to convey to audiences."
'Flow of Argument'
At USC, students are clamoring for a chance to learn how to communicate in new media. At the beginning of the 2004-5 academic year, the Institute for Mulitmedia Literacy started its honors program with 40 freshmen who had won places over hundreds of other applicants. They had a combined grade-point average of 3.9995 and were succeeded this year by another 40 students.
Each group of 40 — aspiring majors in English, engineering, and many other disciplines — takes a core course, "The Languages of New Media," in its first year. Then, after pursuing their respective majors, the students return to the institute as seniors to complete a multimedia thesis.
Many of the students already possess technological skills far beyond those of typical teenagers. But such students "are sometimes the most difficult to work with because they say, 'I know how to build a Web site,'" says Alex Tarr, a teaching assistant in the program. "But that's not what we're looking for. We're interested in instilling in students the art of a flow of argument."
That emphasis has intrigued Charlotte West, a sophomore who is majoring in business and cinema-and-television studies. What she has learned in the program has helped her in other classes, she says, "because I'm thinking that not everything has to be written in essay form."
In a communications class, for example, she has completed a Flash Media project that used early 20th-century film clips to reveal how men of the period tended to view women in the workplace.
Another student, Cameron Parkins, a sophomore majoring in international relations, has analyzed The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, the popular satirical television program, to tease out what he calls "the authority and aura" that the show's host has created for himself by mimicking the stereotypical personas of news anchors and talk-show hosts. Mr. Parkins says he wanted to reveal how easily television entertainers can manipulate viewers.
Creating multimedia projects is often a taller order than writing a term paper. Steven F. Anderson, a research assistant professor of cinema and television at the university, says the task can become time-consuming. But curbing students' enthusiasm for their elaborate productions is not easy. Producing multimedia "papers," whether they are in the form of Web sites or DVDs, generates excitement, especially because students can show them off to friends and family members, something they are not likely to do with a research paper.
Instructors at the university have developed grading strategies that account for the vagaries of multimedia production. Work is not good if its creators cannot explain both their arguments and their choices of technology.
"Sometimes," says Mr. Tarr, "students will set off on incredibly intricate 3-D ideas, with people shooting through space, and that kind of thing. That's when you ask questions like 'How does interactivity enhance your project?'"
Big-Name Support
Still, because multimedia development has historically been tied to designing video games, instructors try to give students imaginative freedom. "Multimedia has an artistic and creative side that will never be normalized," Mr. Tarr says.
What faculty members in the program do not want is for students to produce beginners' versions of Hollywood or History Channel films.Yet the program's approach has drawn strong support from some Hollywood heavy hitters, including the director George Lucas, producer of the Star Wars series and an alumnus of the university. Mr. Lucas believes it is important for students to master all forms of communication, including visual, musical, and mathematical media.
"We have built up hierarchies and prejudices against various forms of communication that make them less important in the educational system," Mr. Lucas says, "and as a result, kids have to learn many of their communication skills on their own."
Next year Southern California will expand its program to include hundreds of general-education students, which could prove challenging. After all, professors say it is not easy to teach even honors students about, for example, how religious iconography works, how mechanical reproduction evolved in relation to the printed word, and how such technologies are embedded in ideologies — all the while familiarizing students with technological tools of expression they will need for their projects.
It is, says Mr. Anderson, "a lot for them to absorb as freshmen."
Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
